


Do Not Leave Me In The Dark

by orphan_account



Category: La casa de papel | Money Heist (TV)
Genre: F/M, First work in fandom, POV character is a psycopath, Please Don't Kill Me, berlin deserves his own warnings, might be pretty ooc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 03:14:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20735318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Andrés has always done things because they were expected of him. He doesn’t always understand why.Title from the song in Season 3: Guantanamera, by Compay Segundo. I'm sorry if this is OOC, or if I've missed some details. I watched the show to practice my Spanish for school and fell in love, but unfortunately I don't speak very well so I didn't understand a great many of the words. Hope you enjoy this!





	Do Not Leave Me In The Dark

_“I’ve had five divorces. Do you know what five divorces means? Five times that I have believed in love.”_

It’s what Andrés told people when they began to go soft. Like Río – stupid boy, thinking himself in love with a woman like Tokio. Wanting a white picket fence and a garden full of screaming children with a woman fifteen years his senior who still thought sex at five in the_ fucking _morning was a good idea. She’d never give him what he wanted, and he was an idiot for even wanting it in the first place.

Andrés would know – he was the expert. Five divorces teaches a man something after all, and it isn’t optimism.

He’d had children before. Had the white picket fence and the yard, the wife who baked cookies and drank champagne, and every time it ended in disaster. Thrown glass and the babies crying; _you’re so fucking selfish_ and sometimes _you’re a monster_.

It didn’t hurt when they called him that. It never did.

His wife-of-the-moment was always red-faced and shrieking, tears streaming down her face as she clutched the children to her breast, and Andrés felt nothing. A little bit hollow, maybe. A smidge of disappointment that marriage number one-two-three-four-_five_ hadn’t worked out (not counting the string of girlfriends he had between each one).

But not sorrow. Nor grief either, when the children followed their mother and didn’t look back as the car pulled out of the perfectly manicured driveway that Andrés had never once mowed. He knew he wouldn’t see them again, and yet it never hurt.

He simply went back inside the house, put on _Notting Hill_ and watched the actors’ happy ending scroll across the screen. It didn’t trigger any sort of aching in his heart for what he’d lost; simply a curiosity for what such a happy ending might feel like.

Next time, he thought. He’ll know next time.

Andrés knew he fell in love quickly. Or at least, he thought he did. It was simple for him: he saw a woman, attractive, intelligent, spirited. Curiosity began to take root – yes, yes, always with the curiosity – until he had to know her, mind, body and soul. Sometimes he had to take her apart to understand how she worked, but that was simply the nature of curiosity.

His father had said it was love, back when he was still living with Andrés and Mamá, before Mamá got sick. When Andrés came home and told him he wanted to learn how his favourite teacher worked, what she looked like underneath everything, how she thought and felt and lived.

_It’s part of growing up, son_, he’d said, and that was when Andrés knew it was right. If it was normal, it was right, because everyone was doing it and if everyone was doing it, then it must have been right.

Later, there was Sergio – beautiful, perfect, prodigy Sergio who Andrés loved but wasn’t _in love _with because there was a difference between a brother and a lover and that was normal too. Sergio blushed whenever Andrés brought him to meet a new woman, mumbled _I hope you’ll be very happy together_ when pressed and that was how Andrés knew he was in love.

He was curious about other things too. Fascinated by marine documentaries, technology and heists. Biology and Physics, Sociology and Psychology – those were other things he loved but weren’t _in love_ with. That was an important distinction, because people didn’t fall in love with subjects, nor research, nor experiments.

People loved learning, but people fell in love with other people and that was normal.

It was a little difficult to remember the difference when Martín was around, though. Martín always questioned, wrinkled his nose when Andrés brought a new woman home and asked _are you really in love with her?_

Andrés always said yes, because he wanted her, and that was love.

Martín was different. He was _Martín_. He was curious too, like Andrés, wanted to know how things worked and Andrés wanted to know how he worked too but in a different sort of way. He wouldn’t take Martín apart.

Just like how he wouldn’t take Sergio apart either, even though Andrés wasn’t curious about Sergio. He simply wanted him there, without needing to see inside of him. Andrés already knew everything he needed to about Sergio, but for some reason, the lack of curiosity when it came to Sergio never translated into a waning desire to have his brother around.

So there was Sergio and Martín, Martín and Sergio, the only two people in the world Andrés would never dissect in his curiosity. Both of them his brothers, his _hermanos de sangre_, even though only Sergio was related to him by blood.

They were always separate in his mind. The two people he loved but wasn’t _in love_ with – that was important to remember, very important indeed – because they were his brothers, and people loved their brothers.

Andrés thought that his brothers loved him too, but he couldn’t be sure. He was never quite sure about anything, really, because he knew that he wasn’t normal.

Normal people didn’t have to remind themselves what love meant.

Normal people felt something when their children were born, when their wives drove away; not just when planning to rob the fucking Bank of Spain with their brother and best friend in the abandoned wing of a monastery with the chanting of Gregorian monks ringing in their ears.

But Andrés was still curious. He was so, _so_ curious, because he knew how people worked and yet didn’t understand them. The same way he knew stealing was wrong but didn’t understand _why_. Would it matter more, if he did? If he could feel it, instead of know it?

He knew Sergio felt it. Sergio made plans, brilliant plans that didn’t involve the spilling of a single drop of blood – took pains to avoid it, actually. And though Sergio tried to deny it, it was as much about the guilt he felt at hurting people as it was about political impact. Perhaps more, even.

Andrés wanted to feel that guilt, even just for a moment. Would it make him more human, less of a monster? He didn’t know.

_Monster_. What an ugly word. For all his dignity, all his style and pride and knowledge, Andrés had been a monster since he was born. _Completely without empathy_, the criminal psychologist had said before they’d thrown his ass in prison for nearly a decade.

What was empathy? Was it guilt? Love? Perhaps it was simply curiosity.

Andrés didn’t know. All he knew was that something was broken, something inside him that normal people had and he didn’t. But he could hide it. Could hide it so well, in fact, that he could make people love him. And that was important, because everyone knew that love was blind.

It didn’t matter, in the end, that Andrés was broken. If he could blind the world, no one would see it. And for all intents and purposes, he would be normal.

He would _love_.


End file.
